On the first day of Hurricane Season, June 1, a certain unease creeps into the city of New Orleans.
Residents begin checking the weather forecasts for low depression spots, the harbingers of monster storms. And they start thinking about levees partly because shortly after the devastating flood during Katrina, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported that annual levee inspections in Orleans Parish tended to be quick drive-by affairs ending with lunch for 40-60 people costing the state as much as $900.
While this is true, the same reports went on to suggest that the quickie inspections might have contributed to the catastrophic flooding and that the local Orleans Levee Board (OLB) may be partly responsible. Neither suggestion was ultimately proved true, but the myths persist.
Here is what really happened.
Pre-Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers was required to administer annual levee inspections of completed federal flood protection levees in Orleans Parish.
ER 1130-2-530, 30 Oct 96 establishes the policy for the operation and maintenance (O&M) of USACE flood control and related structures at civil works water resource projects and of USACE-built flood protection projects operated and maintained by non-Federal sponsors.
This program, called the Inspections of Completed Works by the federal sponsor (Corps) was designed to insure that the local sponsor (Orleans Levee Board) was complying with its federally mandated levee maintenance.
Before the 2005 flood, the OLB's maintenance activity included mainly cutting the grass on levee embankments and removing unwanted vegetation and debris. But, the OLB also performed other activities like checking concrete surfaces for open cracks, and inspecting for ruts, depressions and erosion on earthen levees.
To be clear, responsibility for the annual inspections belonged solely to the Army Corps. It would obviously be a conflict of interest for the OLB to inspect its own work. The Army Corps's inspections should perhaps be thought of as independent annual quality audits of the OLB's year-round maintenance activity.
Additionally, the Corps of Engineers' annual inspections were not designed to verify structural stability and performance and thus, could not have been expected to uncover potential problems with levees' and flood walls' ability to function. In other words, they were not a factor in the flooding as concluded by the preeminent report for information relating to the 2005 flood - the Decision-Making Chronology Report of 2008.
The drive-by levee inspections are therefore, a red herring in the story about the New Orleans flood.
To our knowledge, the Army Corps of Engineers has not directly supported the myth of the levee inspections. The myth apparently took wings on its own, months before the major levee investigations were completed; and in a post-flood environment of anger, grief and a rush to pass judgement.
After the levee failure investigations all concurred that design and construction flaws, not mother nature, was responsible for the flood, Congress responded by passing the first ever country-wide levee safety legislation which may affect the 55% of the nation's population protected by levees. The legislation ordered national policy changes in levee safety and levee building.
And even though annual levee maintenance inspections were irrelevant in the New Orleans Flood, the Army Corps also overhauled its annual inspections protocols nationwide. Now using global positioning and other modern technology, the Army Corps' annual inspections of completed works are more formal, more uniform and pay greater attention to all components of the levee system.
In the meantime, those annual lunches, which were intended as a social occasion for Army Corps personnel to meet staffers from the Orleans Levee Board, are a thing of the past.
Hopefully, myths and misinformation regarding the pre-Katrina levee inspections, and their role in the catastrophic flooding of August 2005, will also soon become a thing of the past.
This article was written with assistance from H.J. Bosworth, Jr., P.E., civil engineer and lead researcher for Levees.org.
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And of course the fact that PlaqueParish has millions in oil/gas/mineral royalties per year but diverted them to "general fund projects" (the Finance Director under oath said she did NOT know the state dedicated those revenues to levees, even though the law has been on the books since 1898!) somehow gets overlooked. But what the hey, who cares as long as our rulers get a big barrel of pork (and even better, spending money, see Delta Development and fellow looters, or Win-or-Lose and fellow looters, for example.)
It is sad that we ( the victims) must continue to be the watch-dog for this government agency, whose integrity is zero.
I pray for no hurricanes in the Gulf this season..but I try to be ready to evacuate at the sign of a storm in the Gulf.
Climate change impacts put us in the bulls eye yet again. Thankfully, for a few of those issues, we've got Levees.org and a great team of watchdogs, but I fear that on climate change, our state (and nation) is woefully lacking in leadership. The state has an aggressive plan for coastal restoration, which would be funded in part by BP's clean water act fines if Congress sees fit to direct them to the Gulf, but even buried within that plan is the acknowledgment that without equally aggressive action to avert the worst case scenarios of global warming impacts, it's game over for the coast, and Louisiana's coastal communities.
The focus has been on the foolish and misguided policy and design decisions made by the Corps and its consultant-contractors. Those mistakes and blunders were "baked into the cake," so to speak, and were long beyond the reach of repair and maintenance efforts.
If you see a car on the highway with a wheel about to come off, it's easy to imagine what comes next. Many of us wish we had paid more attention to the subtle signs of flood barrier trouble in the days before August 2005. We didn't because we trusted that job to the Corps of Engineers.
I used to call it the Federal Flood of New Orleans, but after spying one of your emails recently I prefer now to call 8/29/05 The Great New Orleans Flood.
I mean, it's up there with the Great Johnstown Flood which is listed on the NRHP. I hope we will see the major breach sites in New Orleans listed there as well.
Thanks for stickin wit'it,
Editilla~New Orleans Ladder